It is well known to employ hangers to attach eaves, troughs or gutters to a building at the lower edge or edges of the building roof. Many known gutter and hanger arrangements, however, have a common drawback in that they often are restricted in their manner of erection and application. In some arrangements, for example, the hanger requires attachment to a vertical facia board or plate on the edge of the roof. As a result, such arrangements cannot be employed with buildings that do not have such facia boards or plates or when such manner of attachment is undesirable or unacceptable. It also is noted that often there is inadequate protection against water overflowing into the adjacent building structure when the capacity of the gutter is exceeded. Such overflow and passage of water into the building, needless to say, is undesirable and may result in structural damage to the building.
In U.S. Pat. No. 3,436,878, for instance, there is disclosed a combined leaf guard and hanger which is designed to be mounted on a facia board suspended from the roof eave or, under certain limited circumstances, to the side wall of the building. The hanger is secured to the facia board and has a hook on the lower edge thereof for mating supporting engagement by a bead at the top edge of the inner wall of the gutter. The gutter also is supported at its outer wall by another turned bead thereon which snaps over a bead on the end of a foraminous sheet extending outwardly from the upright flange.
Other gutter and hanger arrangements are also known to employ hangers having a gutter clip or attachment portion and a flange or flashing portion that may be anchored to the roof. In U.S. Pat. No. 4,195,452, the illustrated hanger has a lower clip portion and an integral flashing portion which when connected to a building, extends upwardly at an angle matching the angle or pitch of the roof. An obvious drawback of this arrangement is that different hangers are required for roofs of different pitches.
One attempt to provide a gutter and hanger arrangement which is adjustable to the slope or pitch of the roof is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,057,117. The gutter thereof is U-shape and has an inwardly and upwardly inclined neck portion that terminates at a bead of generally circular cross-section. The bead is sized to fit in an elongated circular socket on the lower end of one leg of an L-shape hanger. Both legs of the hanger are provided with fastener holes so that the hanger can be secured to the overhang of a roof or to a vertical surface of the building. With hangers thus installed, the bead of the gutter is slid endwise into the sockets of the hangers and then pivoted at such sockets to transversely level the gutter. To hold the gutter in the desired angular relation to the hanger, pins are passed through diametrically opposed holes in the hanger socket and holes in the bead of the gutter.